Valve Trying To Fix TF2 Item Drop Issues

Angry at Valve because you've been AFKing in Team Fortress 2 for sixty hours straight now and still haven't picked up a new item in a random drop? It might get better soon - Valve's been working on fixing the new system.

For all the goodwill Valve had accumulated over two weeks of hilarious and surprising Sniper/Spy Update updates, some of it was arguably lost when that update actually went into effect. See, what Valve didn't tell us was that they'd be instituting a new system for acquiring the new items (as well as all the old ones you may have already had).

Doing away with the Achievement-centered system that necessitated boring grinding or outright cheating, Valve implemented one where players received unlockable items on a sorta random basis determined based on the amount of time you spend playing the game.

Unfortunately, things haven't worked out exactly how the TF2 team planned, and folks have been understandably angry with the game - reports of servers full of players sitting idle just to wait for items to unlock and then getting stuff they've already acquired are probably not what Valve was hoping to get out of this.

So they're trying to fix it, and apparently have taken major steps toward doing so. "Last night we fixed one major problem that accounted for a lot of those cases where people were finding multiple items at once and where other people weren't finding anything at all," TF2 director Robin Walker told Kotaku. "So we fixed that. We're not at all sure that that fixed everything, so we're going to keep plugging away at that."

Other item-related things Valve is plugging away at: item trading (the reason why you find items you already have is so you can trade them), giving players the ability to work toward the specific items they want, and more "rare items like the hats." So don't be a grouchy gamer and condemn TF2 and Valve for getting off to a rocky start. Sounds like they're trying their hardest to get things where they should be.